He failed to get other left-wing donors to join his crusade
to make climate change the No. 1 election issue. Then he wasted nearly $75
million backing liberal candidates. Four out of the seven politicians he and
his NextGen Climate Action group backed lost. And the few races where liberals
won owed little or nothing to Steyer’s bizarre and sometimes inaccurate
campaign ads.

Now Steyer is gearing up to try to influence the 2016
presidential election, but he may need to reexamine his strategy first. The
Wall Street Journal argued that curbing carbon emissions, Steyer’s pet issue,
“will be a campaign issue in two years,” but this doesn’t mean that Steyer was
successful in trying to push that this year. Even liberal media outlets agreed
that Steyer’s recent attempts had gone “mostly belly-up.” For good reason.

With the final election of 2014 ending in another GOP
victory on Dec. 6 and the 2016 presidential race already begun, Steyer seems unwilling to admit those failures. “One thing
is clear: we’ve made our mark, and this pivotal year for climate politics has
given our efforts an unprecedented leg up,” he said in a post-election
statement. He added “this is only the beginning” and vowed to “put climate on
the ballot for our presidential candidates in 2016.” The media seem willing
largely willing to excuse him, with Politico on Dec. 8, listing Steyer among
possible replacements for retiring liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

But, 2014 isn’t done making him look bad. In a particularly
cruel twist, the run-off for Louisiana’s Senate seat showcases two candidates,
both who support the KXL pipeline. That’s the very project NextGen seeks to
halt, despite the fact that it would create thousands of American jobs. The very project NextGen calls “a bad deal for the
United States.”

One big reason for Steyer’s failure was his oddball campaign
against conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. NextGen spent
$4,532,460 running ads accusing the Koch brothers of being “polluters,”
“playing dirty” and of being from “out of state.” That last one was an
especially odd criticism coming from another out-of-state billionaire. None of
the seven political races Steyer focused on this year were in his home state of
California.

That didn’t matter. Steyer’s anti-Koch efforts mirrored
those of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Hill Democrats. One of the
NextGen ads didn’t even bother with accusations, choosing instead to flash a
picture of the Koch brothers while ominous music played.

But the Koch brothers weren’t the biggest spenders in 2014.
Steyer was.

Steyer spent $74 million on the 2014 election cycle, making
him by far the single biggest political contributor for the entire year. Former
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, another liberal, came in second at $40
million, according to Politico. That was only slightly more than
half Steyer’s massive total.

Yet, without seeing an irony in doing so, Steyer continued
to run ads insisting that a vote against conservative candidates was a vote
against the Koch brothers. Far from being just another concerned citizen,
Steyer’s own political contributions were a lot more self-serving than he’d like to admit.

Thirty-nine percent of all NextGen Climate ads were about
the Kochs. NextGen ran ads specifically trying to tie candidates to the Koch
brothers an incredible 7,637 times out of 19,515 televised political ads.

Overall, NextGen made 35 ads this year and seven (one-fifth)
tried to demonize the candidates by tying them to the Koch brothers.

Steyer
did manage to fund three candidates who won their races, but his influence in
those races was negligible at best.

The local Fox affiliate in Detroit called Terri Lynn
Land’s Michigan senatorial campaign “lackluster” on Oct. 13, noting that even
conservatives were unhappy with her. During the two weeks leading up to the
election, even the National Republican
Senatorial Committee decided to pull the plug on $800,000 worth of TV ads for Land. A Real Clear Politics poll showed Land’s numbers were
down before Steyer even intervened.

In fact,
out of the grand total of $30.8 million that Steyer spent on specific races
(not all of that was on televised ads), 73 percent went to candidates who ended
up losing their races, according to OpenSecrets.

Every one of the ads NextGen ran against Land tied her to
the Kochs. These 4,444 ads cost Steyer’s
Political Action Committee $2,865,560, and only ran from Sept. 3 to Sept. 27.
Lands’ poll numbers did drop 2.5 points during this time, but this was part of
an overall downward trajectory and doesn’t seem to have been affected by the
NextGen Climate.

Even National Review dismissed Land’s election as a
predictable loss. “How bad was she?” NRO writer John J. Miller asked on Nov. 4.
“In recent days, she lost the endorsement of the Detroit News, whose editorial
page routinely backs Republicans. In other words, she walked into a room of
right-leaning editorialists — and performed so badly that they felt compelled
to back her opponent. This takes a special kind of lousy.”

Land wasn’t the only candidate Steyer opposed, but who
apparently lost without his help.

In Massachusetts, Steyer ran anti-Scott Brown adds from Aug.
22 to Sept. 14, when Brown was behind in the polls. But Brown’s best poll numbers cam later in October, after
Steyer had already stopped his television advertising in that state. Although
Brown ended up losing his race, his poll numbers showed a fairly steady
improvement from the end of June all the way up until the election.

The same trend can be seen in the polls for outgoing
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s campaign. Although Corbett lost by a
significantly larger margin than Brown, Corbett’s poll numbers showed a steady improvement from
late July onward. Steyer’s anti-Corbett ads ran from July 10 to July 20.

Steyer also spent much less on the Brown and Corbett
campaigns. NextGen committed $133,150 to fund its ad campaign against Brown and
$1,737,170 against Corbett.

Media Outlets View Steyer As
Ineffective

The Washington Post noted on Nov. 3 that Steyer’s ad
campaign didn’t seem to be influencing the election much -- at least not
according to national polling data available at the time.

Of the seven races that Steyer focused on, only three
targeted candidates actually lost their races. It would be hard to call any of
those Steyer victories and the media were appropriately critical. Even the
establishment liberal outlet Politico observed on Nov. 5 that Steyer’s
“Political investments mostly went belly-up Tuesday.”

It wasn’t the campaign’s only failure.

Steyer has had trouble getting other liberal mega-donors on
board with his climate crusade. NextGen Climate had initially claimed Steyer
would raise $50 million from outside donors and match it with $50 million of
his own money. However, when when it became obvious this goal would not be met
by the election, Steyer
denied knowing where that number came from.

NextGen only managed to raise $2 million from non-Steyer
sources, $48 million less than promised.

Steyer
told The Los Angeles Times on Oct. 12, that he blamed “somebody I don't know
who has never owned up to it." However, the Times added that “[a]ctually,
Steyer's political strategists suggested the sum, both in public and private.”

That wasn’t the only campaign
problem.

NextGen has faced criticism, even
from the left, for political ads Politico aptly dubbed “bizarre.”The Post criticized a NextGen ad targeting the Keystone Pipeline,
giving it “four Pinocchios,” the most scathing falsehood rating that the Post
can give to something. (The explanation of the Pinocchio rating system ishere.)

The ad claimed the Keystone
Pipeline, rather than benefiting U.S. and Canadian interests, would primarily
benefit China at the expense of the U.S. The hit job even included an
out-of-context quote from Alexander Pourbaix, the Executive Vice-President and
President of Development for TransCanada.

According to the Post, that ad in
particular “does not even meet the minimal standards for such political attack
ads. It relies on speculation, not facts, to make insinuations and assertions
not justified by the reality.” The Post, which is neither conservative nor in
favor of the pipeline, called the ad “especially disturbing, even by the
standards of attack ads.”

Yet, Steyer
defended that same ad to the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 12, arguing "I have
not seen anything ... that I did not think was supportable.” (Ellipses theirs).

Steyer’s vendetta against the Kochs didn’t stop there. Not
content with the typical, anti-business liberal spiel, he even came up with new
things to blame on Charles and David Koch. One of the commercials that Steyer’s political nonprofit, NextGen Climate,
posted on its YouTube channel (although it didn’t run on television) implied
that the Koch brothers were part of the same group of people who “told us the
world was flat, and insisted it was the center of the universe.

Steyer’s anti-Koch tirade wasn’t limited to just political
attack ads either. He paid
for a small model of Noah’s Ark to tour Florida. The stunt claimed that Florida
Gov. Rick Scott was going to let climate change flood his state, and then he
would save his powerful friends in an ark.

Anti-Koch rants and elections
aren’t the only things that Steyer has funded either. The billionaire has
donated more than $4.7 million to liberal groups since 2009, on
top of his political donations. One of these groups, the Center for American Progress, was called “the mothership” for “Obama’s 2012
Campaign Cavalry” by The Huffington Post, a moniker which CAP proudly accepted
in its annual report.

Partial List of Steyer’s Donations Since 2008:

● Center for American Progress:
$2,650,000

● Center for Ecoliteracy: $1,292,769

● Environmental Defense Fund:
$500,000

● EcoTrust: $471,000

● 350.org: $250,000

Pro-Steyer Media
Coverage

Despite
his failures, the media have been fond of Steyer ever since he burst onto the
scene.

The Washington Post proudly declared Steyer an “environmental hero” on June 9. This is typical
of the type of coverage that Steyer and NextGen have received from the media.

Although they all they all talked about Steyer, The
Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times and USA Today all portrayed Steyer in
a positive light. As far as the papers are concerned, Steyer is a poster boy
for a worthy cause. The New York Times even devoted an entire feature story to visiting Steyer and touring
his cattle ranch, in November, 2013.

Steyer isn’t
alone in his fascination with the Koch brothers, ABC, CBS and NBC are also quick to paint them
as villains. Just in the time since Steyer joined his brother in founding The
Center for the Next Generation on Sept. 16, 2011, ABC, CBS and NBC have done just one story mentioning
Steyer and his funding, and even then it was a mere 34 words in a story about
the Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch got the
once-over from all three networks. There were 22 mentions of the Kochs funding
conservative groups or politicians in that time. That’s a 22-1 ratio.

Methodology

All information regarding the cost and airing of NextGen
political commercials was supplied by Kantar Media. For media analysis, MRC
Business looked at records of The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, USA Today and LA Times articles since Jan. 1, 2011, and at Politico
articles from the past year for context.